Penn’s campus home for Asian students turns 25.
There’s a dreary December drizzle spattering campus, but you’d never know it inside the Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH). Tucked beneath Locust Walk in the ARCH building’s lowest level, it’s pure hygge: twinkling string lights, colorful origami cranes, dangling paper lanterns.
The cultural center’s staff, dressed in identical PAACH sweatshirts, mingle with a dozen or so undergrads, arranging group photos, answering questions, and urging everyone they see to grab a mini corn dog, which they’ve laid out in a nod to the popular Korean snack.
“You always feel welcomed there,” says Affan Jabbar C’27, who visits often. Gina Joo C’27 says the center is “definitely a safe space for me.” Besides holding a student job there, she stops in to nap on the couches or when she needs a cup of hot tea. “I also know that if I go to the PAACH suite, most likely I’m going to see a familiar face and get to catch up and chat,” she says.
This school year marks PAACH’s 25th anniversary, and it’s celebrating with a slew of special events on top of its usual fare. Since 2000, the center has served Penn’s Asian and Pacific Islander students and anyone interested in learning more about those cultures. From holiday celebrations to peer mentoring, guest speakers, and meeting space for over a dozen student groups, there is no shortage of activity inside its origami-filled walls.
“This is a very diverse and vibrant community,” says Mei Long, PAACH’s director since 2023. Whether students are attending a formal talk or just relaxing with their friends, “we’re very intentional about creating space for people to have meaningful conversations about who we are and how our identities shape our experiences.”
Lately Long and her staff of three have been focused on designing new signature programs “that are open and relevant to the entire community,” she says. The newest one launched last fall, thanks to a gift from alumnus Chris Davies C’81. The API Leadership Series includes an annual fireside chat with a standout alum and a springtime panel of API leaders from across industries. (The next one is slated for March 27.)
“Leadership is such a relevant topic for our community,” Long says. “Despite their high educational attainment, qualifications and skillset, somehow you don’t see Asians advancing into senior leadership positions across all industries. It’s called ‘the bamboo ceiling.’” She hopes that bringing alumni industry leaders back to campus will inspire students to pursue these high-level roles themselves.
Cultural celebrations are also a PAACH mainstay. With students from diverse Asian communities and heritages—Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, Pacific Islander, Kazakhstani—and a staff who tries to honor all of their traditions, “there’s always something going on there,” Jabbar says.
Whether it’s at a Diwali party, a Filipino paper star-making workshop, a boba tea social, or any of PAACH’s many other events, students are continually connecting with their own API cultures and others’ too.
“A lot of the people who come to PAACH have a shared interest in Asian identity and celebrating that,” says Jabbar, who is Bengali. “I wanted to get closer to my own culture and identity in college, so PAACH was a space that I instinctively gravitated to.”
He’s one of many undergrads who frequent the center’s cozy “living room,” as he and others call it. Long says graduate students have historically been tougher to draw in, despite their large API population. She’s been focused on introducing PAACH to more grad students these past two years, and it’s working.
PAACH now supports three groups for graduate students, along with nine undergrad organizations. That includes a group for South Asian women, one for API nonbinary students, a leadership program, and a peer mentoring program. “We spend a lot of time advising Asian-related student organizations, some of which were established directly out of the center,” Long says.
In fact, it was a student group that spurred PAACH’s creation 25 years ago. Founded in 1995, the Asian Pacific Student Coalition began advocating for a specialized resource center on campus in 1999. They launched a campus-wide campaign—holding a rally, circulating petitions, and ultimately meeting with then-President Judith Rodin CW’66 Hon’04.
Penn’s Pan-Asian American Community House officially opened on November 11, 2000. Today it is located inside the vibrant and recently reimagined ARCH building on 36th Street and Locust Walk, right near similar spaces for Latinx (Casa Latina) and Black (Makuu) students [“Gazetteer,” Nov|Dec 2022]. Along the wall outside all three centers runs the shared “ARCH Way,” with booths and tables. “I study there with a lot of friends,” says Jabbar. “Even if we don’t plan to be there at the same time, we’ll often still end up there together.”
During his years at Penn, Paulo Bautista W’14 says that PAACH became the most important spot on campus to him. That’s why, after his commencement ceremony in the spring of 2014, it was his last stop before heading to the airport. He showed up with suitcase in hand, offering a last goodbye to the place that had meant so much to him.
And yet, as with so many PAACH alumni, it wasn’t a final parting. Over a decade later, Bautista still visits at least twice a year and meets up with current PAACH students during their annual New York City retreat. “PAACH helped me deepen my understanding of my own Asian American identity,” says Bautista, who is Filipino American.
“Staff members come and go. The specifics change. But I’m excited to hopefully be there in 25 years to celebrate PAACH’s 50th and see what kind of PAACH it is then.”
—Molly Petrilla C’06
